II'm trying to understand this difference:
1280x720 scene rendering in preview window 1000 passes = 37 seconds
Same scene rendering in "Image and mp4" mode with 200 passes = 180 seconds
Why 20 times slower?  I'm sure there's a good reason...
And I know there's some emulation going on inside iClone, but... 
And maybe this is a super-dumb question but...
Would it be possible to get the render engine to work as fast as the preview window, please?
If the preview window lacks something important, frankly, I'm willing to give it up because the preview window's quality is incredible and the "official" render seems marginally better, which is too a big price to pay for 20 times slower.
So big, in fact, that if I were to use iRay I would probably just sit in front of the screen and start saving the previews by hand rather than running the "real" render.
So, please, can you just make the preview renderer an option for creating a video... or fix the real renderer if its slow performance is a bug?
Again, I'm probably asking the wrong question but, frankly, I just bought a $14,000 computer to run iRay renders and I was hoping for the ability to get something reasonable in less than 1 minute per frame for a "real" scene.
So I'm very happy with the preview renderer! Woohoo.
But I don't really want to start building each frame by hand and saving it in order to make a video. But that's where I feel like I'm headed.




Geoffrey James
Intel Core i9-9980XE 18 Cores @ 4.5GHz, 128GB @ 3000MHZ, 2 NVIDIA® TITAN RTX, 512GB SSD, 2TB SSD, 10TB HDD, 1200 Watt PS, Viewsonic 43" 4K. 

I am a bit puzzled by numbers.

1280x720 scene rendering in preview window 1000 passes = 37 seconds

Understood

Same scene rendering in "Image and mp4" mode with 200 passes = 180 seconds
Why 20 times slower? 

 

You said MP4, meaning you render a sequence of frames. How many? What is the resolution?
Rendering a single frame in "Preview" mode in no way faster than rendering the same single frame with any mode from "Render Scene" (given the same number of samples and same resolution).
Rendering a sequence is of course would be slower than rendering a single frame (regardless whether it is Preview or Render mode).

Also...  I'm asking this partly for the benefit of other people who might be reading this thread...
Are you sure your "Preview" window is really 1280x720?  If you click the "Save" icon in the Preview window, that's the size of your saved image?

Anyway, I believe 4u2ges probably hit on the key question... are you comparing a single frame preview to a multi-frame animation sequence?

---

iClone 7... Character Creator... Substance Designer/Painter... Blender... Audacity...
Desktop (homebuilt) - Windows 10, Ryzen 9 3900x CPU, GTX 1080 GPU (8GB), 32GB RAM, Asus X570 Pro motherboard, 2TB SSD, terabytes of disk space, dual  monitors.
Laptop - Windows 10, MSI GS63VR STEALTH-252, 16GB RAM, GTX 1060 (6GB), 256GB SSD and 1TB HDD

I probably got myself confused, so I repeated the experiment.
SETUP
I loaded up a fairly detail scene.
I then created a camera, moved 10 on the time line and zoomed the camera out (so that each frame would be different).
TEST 1
I expanded the viewport so that the iRay preview function created a 1334 x 750 png. I set the passes to 500.
I did a preview render, saved it, moved the timeline up by 1.
I repeated the process four times. It took me 6 minutes 18 seconds to create 5 frames.
TEST 2
I rendered that sequence using the standalone render selection on the render scene iRay menu.
The iClone preprocessing took about 5 minutes.
The iRay rendering (5 frames) took an additional 4 minutes.
So that was roughly 50% more time to do automatically what I was doing by hand.
TEST 3
I then moved to 20 on the timeline and moved the camera again.
The iClone preprocessing took 8 minutes.
The iRay rendering (10 frames) took 9 minutes 30 seconds.
So that's 17 minutes 30 seconds versus about 12 minutes, 40 seconds that it would have taken to do it by hand.
COMMENT
So obviously my "20 times" was way off, but I'm not off in thinking that it takes significantly less time to build frames by hand than to do it automatically, which seems off to me.

Geoffrey James
Intel Core i9-9980XE 18 Cores @ 4.5GHz, 128GB @ 3000MHZ, 2 NVIDIA® TITAN RTX, 512GB SSD, 2TB SSD, 10TB HDD, 1200 Watt PS, Viewsonic 43" 4K. 

Just to be clear; this topic was just me being totally confused and freaking out because my wife was on my case because I bought an expensive computer for what is essentially a hobby--without really explaining how much it would cost--and my brain was on overload going "ARGH" I just wasted all that money!!!!!!!   Of course, it was just me being confused and I eventually got the renderer working reasonably well.  Marriage survived because I bought the wife a new car.

Geoffrey James
Intel Core i9-9980XE 18 Cores @ 4.5GHz, 128GB @ 3000MHZ, 2 NVIDIA® TITAN RTX, 512GB SSD, 2TB SSD, 10TB HDD, 1200 Watt PS, Viewsonic 43" 4K.